Heather signed up for Verizon DSL service at her new place last September. So she’s been enjoying several months of cost-effective Internet service by now, right? Not exactly. Her story is a perfect illustration of why it is that monopolies can make customers miserable. The scheduled installation technician never showed up, troubleshooting of her service didn’t work, and when she tried to set up service again months later, they misplaced her account and kept hanging up on her.

I originally signed up for Verizon’s DSL internet to be installed at my new apartment last September. They sent me the modem in the mail and insisted that I needed to schedule a technician to come out and install it. I knew I didn’t need a technician but since they wouldn’t place the order without it I finally gave in and scheduled a day for the tech to come out. I took the day off that the tech should have been there because they said that he should be there between 8 and 5. I called throughout the day to make sure I was, in fact, on the schedule but at the end of the day he never came. I called once more only to find out that there was never a technician scheduled to come to my apartment. Out of frustration I fumbled through the process of setting up the modem myself. It wasn’t difficult to set up but their website was kind of confusing. I did manage to get the internet working though for about two days.

At that point, the internet stopped working and I had to call to troubleshoot the problem with tech support. After two days they were unable to get it fixed so I finally gave up and cancelled my account. I decided to use the mobile hot spot with my cell phone provider instead.

Now, in January, I have found out that the mobile hot spot is no longer going to be an option so I thought that I would try, one more time, to get Verizon to turn on my service since I still had the modem. After calling customer service, I was first told that I had to set up a new account. Ok, that was not a problem. The customer service representative said she had to run my credit (which was weird because I never had to do this the first time I set it up). After running my credit she then told me that she would have to connect me to someone else to finish the order. At that point, she transferred me to tech support, which had nothing to do with the problem.

The rep, who was named [A], was very nice and tried to help me but eventually he didn’t know what to do and ended up transferring me back to a salesperson. At this point I had been on the phone for an hour and a half just trying to get Verizon to basically reinstate my old account but no one could do it.

This girl was rude from the beginning of the call and refused to help me at all. She tried to tell me that she was going to have to run my credit AGAIN in order to set up the account. I told her that it had already been done and she said it didn’t matter, that she would have to do it again. I told her that this would negatively affect my credit and asked why it was not in her system from the previous person doing it an hour before. She told me that their system doesn’t keep information in it once the credit check has been run, which makes no sense at all. She also claimed that she could not find my previous account information in her system because I had an account that was now closed. I asked her to speak with a supervisor and she flat out refused to allow me to speak with one because I was technically not a customer because I didn’t have an active account. I told her that I didn’t have an active account because Verizon was never able to get the service to work!!

Basically, I cannot submit any pictures for you because the only thing I got from Verizon was a modem. I never got any account information from them and they refuse to tell me my account number now. Also, the first person who ran my credit set up and then cancelled an order for service but I have no idea what service it was for. The representative would not give me any information about it because it was not an active order.

Out of all the times I called about this issue, I was hung up on at least 7 times. One time I was put on hold for an hour without the representative checking on me and forced to hang up and call back and once the representative said flat out, “I’m sorry but we have been on the phone for 45 minutes and I am going to have to hang up now.” After not helping me at all.

This is a classic example of a case where a customer would like to give a company money, but the company just isn’t interested in taking it. Sometimes Verizon is responsive to executive e-mail carpet bombs: but it sounds like they don’t really want Heather’s money in the first place.

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